Concepts and Other Musings

Please click on the artwork for a description or click on the white dot if you are on your mobile.  Please contact me if you would like to buy an artwork, shipping is an extra charge.

The first artwork above was a commission in 2023 and it is called “Equal Mending.” You can go to my Instagram Page to see my artwork and other artist’s artworks that also made art for this company. The Company is called BIOAS Technologies in London, ON they plan to use textiles from Goodwill to create new fibre. My artwork repurposed materials from Goodwill, and from my home and studio.

The second Artwork above is something that I created from left over unfinished embroidery kit projects. I think it is quite interesting since I used the back of the artworks for the front of the piece and then did a kind of impasto work around it. It is called “Unfinished”

“Unfinished” is being exhibited in the Annual Juried Exhibition “Visual Elements 66” at the Woodstock Art Gallery from July 13th to September 21st, 2024.

The wall sculpture below called “Soft Picasso” was also the introduction to an exhibition called Found at the beginning of 2023 at the St. Thomas Elgin Public Art Centre in Ontario, Canada. Here is a video of this exhibition. It is made from found materials from thrift stores, my home property, my studio and found imagined or objects in my mixed media paintings. The artworks are a kind of invocation through the materials used, and so by using stuffed animals in the sculptures they become child like but can also be signs or symbols of a spiritual nature. Even the found images in the mixed media paintings seem like memories or dreams, or possibly things to come. I hope all the artworks were enjoyed by everyone young at heart.

Untitled / Soft Picasso Revised and Improved

Above is another type of repurposing that I worked on, on and off for about a year. A year because the process of the work needed to be worked out intuitively as more materials showed up eventually and it was completed. It is called “Soft Picasso.” It is made of stuffed animals and the frame and stretcher bars were from an unwanted framed print. These items would have made their way to the land fill.

Frame size 26 Inches Wide X 30 Inches High. These measurement of width and height are variable to the material exuding from the wood frame. The textile portion extends out from the frame approximately 11-14 Inches.

Wood frame and wood stretcher bars, cotton canvas, variable coloured polyester material and plastic forms (eyes etc.) polyester/ cotton thread. Not For Sale

Exhibition Work for the Garage Gallery Benmiller 2021 Below

Artist Statement

Beginning the discussion.

About six and a half years ago I took a lovely trip to the Dominican Republic. I wanted, you know, a retreat in paradise. I visited a previous work colleague who was living there at the time. She spent a few days letting me know the lay of the land as they say and also took me to a place called La Boca. She is also an artist and loves to kite-board and La Boca was the perfect spot for that and she promised a wonderful supper after. While I watched her kite-board, she said that the dunes near by beside the ocean had treasures and to go take a look, and so, after watching her for a while I made my way over to the dunes. They looked so inviting at first, then as I saw the ocean, and then I saw the treasures she was talking about. It was garbage, plastic garbage and clothing and the assortment of items strewn everywhere. I thought, where did this come from? Was this not the beautiful paradise I had imagined? There were flip flops, t-shirts, baseball caps, all kinds of plastic items to name a few. Again, I thought where are they from, a ship passing by, the islands garbage. Why was it there? The simple answer is us. We all put it there. We created the items and now we need to accept that this is part of our world. 

After, I left the Dominican Republic, I thought of this several times. I did not have the conclusion that we were doing this until now. For the past six years or so, I forgot about it and I put my blinders on again, but this spring as I went out to the Goderich beach, the waves had brought in treasure again. I found more than just sand, stones and drift wood, I found plastic items, cloth materials, string, and more. I was again reminded of my trip to the Dominion Republic and what we as a “culture” have created. During the past six years and before, I have tried to be diligent on all that I could do about being environmentally friendly to the earth. I have tried to reuse any waste produced in my studio and any house hold materials to make art from it. Confronted with these treasures, I began to embrace it. It is part of our world now. For the past three years I have been painting “en plein air” and using the fibre of the land to create a feeling of a place “in situ.” After painting two in my normal practice ‘en plein air’ this spring, I began to collect the detritus around me. At first I painted the primary colour tones of the objects I had collected, then over night I thought - no they should be white. I pondered the white. It was my neglect, and blindness and direct apathy towards what was really happening, because I was only wanting to see a paradise, that I could not see what was right in front of me. I white washed any responsibility for what was happening, because I have been part of this process. I must now accept what is. 

I have displayed the Webster’s dictionary terminology of what ‘white wash’ means in the gallery. It is just the beginning of the discussion. My acknowledgement and discussion can bring it all to terms of what we might have to just accept, and do the best we can moving forward. Paradise also means accepting all parts of paradise the good and the not so good. What else have we forgotten in paradise, what have we overlooked, what else have we buried in the sand? If we acknowledge all our social ills we can find paradise, within as well. We must remember who we are. We need to remember the paradise is within. This paradise within, can bring us all to a new place.              

Fibre Works on Canvas

Sometimes as a response to something I don’t have control over, my artwork takes a detour and I find myself using my fine motor skills to develop something I do have control over. With Covid 19 in the world, I found myself starting a project away from my 2D painting, that I am really enjoying, to make these Fibre Paintings. They are protruding a bit more than the usual relief that I create on my canvases. These artworks began to take shape this past summer. I made these in a 18 by 18 inch size and in a 10 by 10 inch size below this section of images. I finished the smaller set this fall, which are for the 2020 Blyth Festival Auction (3 small ones have sold thus far and one will be on exhibit this winter at FACTS Gallery in Blyth.

Here is my artist statement for the exhibit taking place at the St. Mary’s Station Gallery in St. Marys, Ontario beginning January 7th and is completed February 19th. (Garden Patch 1, 2, & 3 will be exhibited)

  Artist Statement for ‘Garden Patch’ Artworks  

These ‘Garden Patch’ artworks were a way to expel the feeling of isolation and restriction during Covid-19 for the summer of 2020. It was my way of controlling some aspect of my life with the fine motor skills of my hands. Keeping my hands busy has been a habit for me and reminiscent of my younger self, crocheting in the evenings while my children were young by making patterned table runners and large table cloths which gave me quietude at the time. These table cloths usually had repeated floral and geometric patterns from nature similar to the ‘Garden Patch’ series. This notion is brought forward again through repetitive hand motions and mental concentration of each stem made from clothes line cording forming the garden patches which have that meditative feel of the crocheting I did in the past. The newly expressed ‘Garden Patch’ artworks on painted canvas have little colour, like the table cloths, however, I have interjected some colour with threads as tendrils attached to some of these three dimensional floral structures. In the end, these end up being a larger three dimensional form of the smaller string used in the crocheted table cloths, coupled with the historical painterly form hung on the wall.   

Here, below are the 10 Inch X 10 inch canvas narratives called “A String’s Story.” These are sold separately.

Kim’s installation at the “Why the @#&! Do You Paint?” Exhibit at the Gladstone Hotel 2019.

Repurposing Materials.

Stitching on Paint - and Plastic Gimp Woven and Stretched

Fibre Painting with Familial Embroidered Clothes & My Embroidery 

Thread and Paint Woven Together

In the below artworks thread takes the place of paint and intermingles with it. The thread becomes the paint brush mark in a lot of the artworks below.

Embroidery Imitates and Replaces the Paint Brush Marks. 

Below the brush marks from the background of these abstract drip paintings are brought forward by being Embroidered.

Intuitive String Art with Stitched Paint Brush Marks

Expressing a Feeling and a Memory onto Sandpaper 

When I did these Sandpaper Paintings I had, had a car accident in the area near my old studio in London. I was not sleeping well and decided that I would do some expressive art making like I did in Haliburton in my Post Graduate Course. I took materials at hand in my studio and began to picture feelings and emotions to the sand paper starting with stitching then applying oil pastel. Each panel describes the road and to me my reactions and emotions in colour and texture. These took me most of the day and I slept well that night. 

Always Thinking of Conservation, When I Mix Paint and String

Here I use intuitive laid cotton roping and acrylic paint and embroider the inner parts of the divided sections with Phentex. My concept was to protect and conserve and so I did what I immediately wanted to do. I wrapped it in plastic (table cloth cover) a rebuttal to what we as artists need to think of when doing art. Especially when the materials can become contaminated, but here a kind of sarcastic look at where craft gets marginalized because it may not appear to be fine art. 

Please click on the artwork for a description or click on the white dot if you are on your mobile.  Please contact me if you would like to buy an artwork, shipping is an extra charge.